The Comparison of Problem-Solving Skills, Inquisitive Attitude and Teaching Process among Trained and Untrained Teachers of Action Research Course

The aim of conducting the current descriptive research was the comparison of trained and untrained teachers’ skills in the course of action research in three fields of research insight, problem solving and teaching process. The subjects of this study included 33,368 trained teachers and 12,000 untrained ones from a scholarship initiative course who were working in the township and regional schools of Mazandaran Education Department during the educational years of 1387–1388. The cluster sampling design was used to select the subjects of the study which included two groups of trained and untrained teachers of scholarship initiative course whom were selected based on the Cochran formula. The number of trained teachers was 232 and the number of trained ones was 196.The required data for measuring the variables were obtained from the questionnaire and the researcher-made behavioral–examining checklist. To measure the inquisitive attitude of the studied sample an attitude-examining questioner including 63 questions on Likert scale was used, and for measuring the problem solving scales and teaching process of the studied sample, the behavioral examining checklist was used each contained 20 items in the range of 1 to 5 in Likert scale. The reliability of attitude examining tool of requisites teaching attitude (in research field) was 0.81, and the checklist of behavioral examining of teaching process was 0.76. The statistical analysis of the data was done by SPSS software. At the inferential level, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov was used to determine the normality of data and the T-test of the two independent groups and one-way analysis of variance were used as well. The obtained results of descriptive and inferential spastics are as follows: The obtained results of the statistical test indicated that there was no significant difference between the inquisitive attitude and skills and teaching process of the two groups of trained and untrained teachers from scholarship course, but there were significant differences in the level of 5% error among the two mentioned groups. Other results of this study show that there have been significant differences in the skill of inquisitive attitudes of trained teachers at different educational periods, but there have been no significant differences in the skills of inquisitive attitudes of trained teachers with various service records. Also, comparatively speaking, there have been no significant differences in terms of the ‘problem solving skill’ and the ‘teaching processes between trained teachers with different services records and teachers with the experience of teaching at different courses.